Case Study: Save Mart Centralizes Scheduling

When Modesto, CA-based grocer Save Mart acquired the Northern California division of Albertsons back in February 2007, it more than doubled in size by both number of stores and employee base. The acquisition would have also doubled the size of its legacy labor-scheduling platform, had Steve Gaines and his team not been prepared. Gaines is the straight-to-the-point Senior Director of Retail Efficiencies at Save Mart. To speak with him is to quickly realize that he's the right man for his title. He's direct, he's quick, and I recently had the pleasure of interviewing him and Workforce Management Analyst Tony Kirst about the labor-scheduling initiative at his company. Collectively, these two guys worked for many months prior to the Albertsons acquisition to ensure a smooth labor-scheduling systems transition.

Acquisition aside, Gaines tells me that Save Mart had for some time been due for a labor-scheduling refresh. The retailer had been running a decentralized, outdated version of Tomax labor scheduling, a program whose pedigree was with SuperSked, which Tomax acquired in the late 1990s. In true formulaic interview fashion, I probe Gaines on why this was a problem. "SuperSked sat on servers in each one of our stores," he explains. "These servers were disconnected, which did not entirely prevent us from achieving continuity, but made it extremely difficult." Corporate visibility of store-level scheduling was therefore, as you can imagine, not an option. When I ask how his company went about the task of aggregating scheduling and labor hours data across the enterprise in a decentralized system, Gaines responds in a fashion of his own.

Used with permission from Integrated Solutions For Retailers magazine.